Frequently in history there have been times in various arts when types (kinda like but not really genres) of works have been sincerely produced by artists, and then subsequently the underling principles of the type have proven so absurd that those sincerely produced works can be enjoyed as deviations or excesses, particularly when they have a self-consistent style that is wonderful to wallow in.

Parallel to that, there have also been inept artists in a variety of valid types who have through good fortune or perseverance or luck been able to get their works into a public awareness.

In the late 1950s/early 1960s a school of criticism developed proposing such works as "camp," so bad that they're really good. That was fine.

The Batman TV series in the late 1960s(?) was an example of an effort to artificially produce camp in a self-aware manner. It was an admitted total failure (in terms of camp intent) by the creative staff, but it was fairly successful commercially because it actually was cute in unintentional ways to a variety of non-camp-oriented viewers. People have been trying to repeat that success ever since. Early on it was discovered that you could do cheap crap and pretend it was "camp" (Batman had actually been a fairly classy production) and a reasonably-sized audience would fool themselves into thinking they were in on some trendy joke.

This went on for a long time, with some minor successes and lots of dreck.

Then the SF (or whatever) Channel thought they could mass produce sub-drek and fool a minuscule but marginally profitable audience into thinking that they were experiencing something fun. The degradation of that process continued to the extreme of Sharknado (maybe beyond camp and into some whole other phenomenon that will be better understood in a few decades) and Sharknado II was inevitable.

I haven't seen the first one yet, but I LOVE movies that are so bad they are good!

The worst are movies that are bad but try to be good.

Sharknado happens to be the latter.

It's just... awful. Which is why I never understood why Sharknado II was announced about a week after Sharknado was broadcast and they said it was well received.

And given how often it was rebroadcast on multiple channels (it seemed everyone had shown it multiple times), I thought it must've been something good.

But 15 minutes in, I turned off the dreck.

I mean, every channel had it on, multiple times, it was the talk of the town everywhere I went... and yet, I couldn't find anyone who liked it. Just lots of talk.

Edit: It feels like one year-long April Fool's joke, to be honest. And really, I do like dreck - it seems a lot of movies people hate, I end up liking. I've generated an interpretation of movie ratings - 2-3 stars is a show I'd really like, 1 is dreck, 4-5 are too heavy for entertainment.

No. Sharknado was made specifically as camp. It never had any aspirations that it was a good movie.

The guys of MST3K, Cinematic Titanic, and Rifftrax made a career out of movies that were bad but tried to be good. One excellent example that Rifftrax recently did was "Birdemic: Shock and Terror." There is no indication that the creator of Birdemic, James Nguyen, set out to make a bad film, but that's what it ended up as.

Personally, films like "Sharknado" that deliberately set out to be cheesy, campy, schlock aren't enjoyable. It's the unintentionally bad that are hilarious. But - your mileage may vary. There are apparently a large number of people that reveled in Sharknado's blatant, deliberate over-the-top campiness.

Actually, I still like Monty Python and Fawlty Towers. Monty Python and the Holy Grail is still a classic and one of my all time favorites. Firesign Theater required you to have a certain mindset before you could sit down and listen to it, if you get my drift.

Sharknado isn't entertainment, on any level, regardless of the amount of mind altering substances consumed.

Monty Python/Fawlty Towers stand up well if you're sober or under the influence.

There, I said it!

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Can someone explain to me who watched it? I mean, I tried to watch it - I got about 10 minutes in then hat to turn it off. I know people here seemed to enjoy mocking it.

I half-watched it with a tablet computer in my hand for the water cooler aspect. It was definitely ridiculous and poorly made; I can't say I found it enjoyable. Intentional camp just doesn't work for me, though I do watch it sober so maybe that's the problem.

A kid I know wears a t-shirt that says "I Survived Sharknado". That explains the whole thing, really. People watch it as a challenge or dare to make it through the whole thing. Only some of us (including myself, here) succeed in that.

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